professional cooks or kitchen workers. The location is remote — during my time as head cook, if we ran out of anything, whether that was not having enough eggs or any other key ingredient, the nearest store was more than two hours away. So we had to adapt and improvise. In addition, the kitchen had no electricity. Everything was prepared by hand.
I look back and wonder how we were so successful. I remember one summer afternoon I sat at a table with a group of guests I had not met as we ate lunch in the guest dining room. A woman across from me introduced herself as a graduate business school professor, and her first question was, “Who is the brains behind this operation?” She had never been to Tassajara before, and she was impressed by the quality of the food, the quality of the service, and her overall experience. In many ways, to visitors, Tassajara looks much like a well-run business conference center. I responded that the brains behind this business was that the people working here didn’t view it as a business. Tassajara is a place of practice, of service, of cultivating mindfulness — which means letting go of wanting things to be different than they are and bringing awareness to one’s full, moment-to-moment experience.
Today, I regard the Tassajara kitchen as a model for what mindful work and mindful leadership mean in any context, of how we can experience great joy and great love right in the midst of pressure, exhaustion, and overwhelm. The monastery’s foundation and integration of mindfulness practice provided an essential context and container for everything we did in the kitchen. There was something almost magical about the level of care, learning, and playfulness, not to mention the joy and satisfaction of providing sustenance for the people we served.
It is possible for mindfulness practice, work, and leadership to be contextualized as one activity, right in the midst of many activities. This requires self-awareness, awareness of others, awareness of time, and awareness of the quality of one’s efforts. Mindful work and mindful leadership both require and cultivate the essential skills we need to thrive, and this dynamic is the guiding principle of this book. In it, I have distilled what I have learned across the breadth of my experience into seven core practices that I hope will help you merge mindfulness and leadership in your everyday work life. In addition, I know that the benefits of meditation and mindfulness support our entire well-being, far beyond the needs of the workplace. They help us thrive in any endeavor.
BIG MIND AND SMALL MIND
The idea of mindful leadership is not exactly new. In an essay entitled “Instructions to the Head Cook,” Dogen, the founder of Zen in Japan during the thirteenth century, advised that the head cook embrace three core practices or “three minds” while leading the kitchen. These are Joyful Mind (the mind that accepts and appreciates everything), Grandmother Mind (the mind of unconditional love), and Wise Mind (the mind that can embrace the reality of change and be radically inclusive).
Mindfulness practice itself originated within rich spiritual traditions that have developed and transformed over thousands of years. Historically, people tend to be drawn to mindfulness practice during times of rapid change, which are accompanied by high levels of stress, volatility, and uncertainty; times much like those we live in right now. In addition, over the centuries, mindfulness has been adapted and integrated to meet the most vibrant and pressing needs of society — not only influencing spiritual traditions but seeping into many facets of daily life and culture, including the arts, food, education, work, and beyond.
While it’s true that increasing self-awareness is a key aspect of mindfulness practice, the intent is more than awareness of one’s individual self. The intention is to cultivate a wider and more inclusive perspective, aspiring to loosen concern about oneself and to expand our narrow personal experience, so we adopt a more universal and less dualistic awareness. This is referred to in Zen as a shift from Small Mind to Big Mind.
Much of what we experience on a moment-to-moment basis is the world of Small Mind — of the personal self, of I, me, and mine. In fact, science now has a name for Small Mind — it’s called the default mode network. This is the part of the brain that is often worrying about the future or ruminating about the past, rather than being relaxed and alert to this moment, to seeing with greater clarity. From a psychological perspective, this is a lot like ego. Mindfulness practice includes learning from and appreciating Small Mind while cultivating Big Mind — the more open, curious, and accepting perspective or way of being. You might say that mindful leadership is about applying the experience of Big Mind, which is cultivated through meditation (but can be accessed anytime), to the concerns of Small Mind, or the pressures and joys of daily life and of working with others to accomplish time-sensitive goals.
After my year as head cook, I was asked to be director of Tassajara, and this further deepened and broadened my experience in mindful leadership. Tassajara, in addition to being a Zen monastery, has many of the challenges common to a small business. For one thing, Tassajara’s revenue provides crucial financial support for the San Francisco Zen Center. It is also, during the summer months, a retreat center — with workshops and overnight guests.
Then, after a year as Tassajara’s director, I decided to leave the monastery to earn a master’s degree at New York University’s Graduate Business School. I was eager (as well as terrified) to enter the business world and test what I was learning about integrating mindfulness, work, and leadership. By then, I felt I’d identified several noticeable benefits to this approach, which are as follows:
• Mindful leadership cultivates a richness of experience; ordinary, everyday work can feel heightened, meaningful, and at times extraordinary.
• It removes gaps between mindfulness practice, work practice, taking care of people, and achieving results.
• It considers learning from stress, challenges, difficulties, and problems to be an integral part of the process of growth and not something to be avoided.
• It helps us recognize and work with contradictions and competing priorities to cultivate flexibility and understanding.
• It helps us experience timelessness, effortlessness, and joy even in the midst of hard work and exceptional effort.
• It can be applied to any activity to cultivate both confidence and humility.
• It embraces individuality and unity — everyone has a particular role and yet all make one team, supported by and supporting one another, practicing together.
• It considers true success twofold — in the character and compassion of the people and in the quality and results of the work.
I’ve since found these benefits of mindfulness practice and mindful leadership to be enduring and universal; they are accessible and available in any situation and to anyone. You don’t need to spend time in a Zen monastery. You don’t need a business degree. All you need is to apply the approach of mindful leadership to whatever situation, challenge, organization, role, or work environment you are in.
Mindfulness is a way of being and of seeing that shifts our perspective. It is pragmatic — endlessly so, in my experience — since it helps us solve everyday problems in effective and efficient ways. It also develops our way of being, adding depth and richness to the experience of life itself. With mindfulness, every task is approached with both humility and confidence, with hope and with letting go of hope. Ultimately, mindfulness is mysterious, plunging into questions of consciousness, birth, death, and impermanence — while providing us with direct experience that, when we let go of our fears and habits, what arises is composure, a deep sense of love, and a profound sense of meaning and connectedness to life.
PAIN AND POSSIBILITY: THE EMPOWERMENT OF MINDFULNESS
Ever since graduating from New York University, I have been part of both worlds, the contemplative
